Many of us are born with it - that is the ability to get up and keep going when we are knocked down, but most of us can use some help improving our capacity to be resilient.
What is resilience?
Resilience is defined as the ability to cope with adversity and recover quickly following difficulties. Being resilient does not mean that you don’t experience difficulty or distress, but rather that you have the ability to “bounce back” following difficult life events. Resilience involves a combination of our thoughts and actions and is something that anyone can develop and improve.
There are many things we can do to increase our ability to be resilient. It is helpful to think about building the capacity for resilience in five key areas of life. These are …
1) Increasing/ maintaining physical fitness
2) Improving our emotional fitness
- Increasing positive emotions while managing negative emotions.
3) Maximising our interpersonal fitness
- Getting what we need from our relationships with others.
4) Enhancing our cognitive (thinking) fitness
- Taking control of the conversation in our head.
5) Nurturing our behavioural fitness
- Maintaining the good and abandoning the bad.
How can we improve our ability to be resilient?
Here are some suggestions for ways to build resilience in these five key areas of life:
1) Increasing/ maintaining physical fitness.
- Exercise regularly
- Get good quality sleep
- Eat healthy
- Avoid mood-altering substances (drugs and alcohol)
- Avoid high-risk and dangerous behaviours
2) Improving our emotional fitness.
- Cultivate positive emotions (hobbies and pleasurable activities)
- Express gratitude
- Make use of positive emotions
- Use skills to manage negative emotions (acceptance, disclosure, mindfulness)
- Face your fears
3) Maximising our interpersonal fitness.
- Be able to accept help from others
- Share your feelings with someone you can trust
- Nurture your important relationships
- Find ways to give back
- Use pets to help manage moods
4) Enhancing our cognitive (thinking) fitness.
- Learn to be flexible (e.g., “is there another way to think about this?”)
- Foster optimism
- Avoid unconstructive guilt and shame reactions
- Establish achievable goals
- Avoid blaming
5) Nurturing our behavioural fitness.
- Develop and follow productive routines
- Develop and use action plans
- Break tasks into manageable sub-tasks
- Use pacing to manage energy expenditure
- Avoid making things worse